Why you should be doing hypertrophy work

Calorie Expenditure: Even though the increase in metabolic rate is not as large as we once thought it was, it can be a factor in caloric expenditure, fat loss, and blood sugar regulation when you add a significant amount of lean mass.

Aerobic Capacity: Adding lead tissue through strength and hypertrophy work almost always improves endurance performance.

Safer to add volume to single-joint movements vs. multi-joint movements: It’s much safer to push the volume of a unilateral movement like a split squat in comparison to a bilateral movement like a back squat. 

Muscle hypertrophy = muscle greater potential to generate force: Correlates to improvements in multi-joint movements: If you want your sexy movements like squats, pulls, and Olympic lifts to go up, then you have to prioritize where you are weakest. For most, it’s as simple as adding more direct posterior chain work to see noticeable gains in all of the aforementioned lifts.

Prehab/Rehab: We can effectively reduce the risk of injury as well as rehabilitate current injuries with accessory work. 

Recovery: This is a great opportunity to include low-demand accessory work (great programming should have recovery built-in.) Single joint exercises can help speed up your recovery all while improving their symmetry.

These are just a few of many reasons to include hypertrophy work. You can’t do it all in one session and too many exercises will not increase adherence. But pick a few and focus on a couple of the reasons below, and reap the gains. 

Brandon Bailey
MS, CSCS, USAW, CFL2